


The Art of Negotiation

by entanglednow



Series: Thermodynamics [2]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Asexuality, M/M, Sharing Body Heat, Sharing a Bed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-08-16
Updated: 2010-08-16
Packaged: 2017-10-14 12:36:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,867
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/149292
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/entanglednow/pseuds/entanglednow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which an experiment has to be repeatable for the results to be valid.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Art of Negotiation

  
The snow stubbornly stays exactly where it is. Which at the moment is _everywhere_. The sun's a blinding stab of light but it's barely warm enough to make the stuff wince, let alone melt it and John can still see his breath in the flat. This is pretty much exactly the sort of day that indoor heating was invented for.

The toaster is missing. He's given up trying to work out exactly how and when these things happen. Either it will show up tomorrow or it won't.

He opens the fridge while the kettle boils, cautiously, since living with Sherlock has taught him to beware of anything that's temperature-controlled. The fact that there's usually more in the way of disturbing experiments in there than food isn't even surprising anymore. This morning it mostly contains milk, half of which John just pours straight down the sink. Sherlock will occasionally have wild stabs at important life skills. Which seem to consist of buying milk and expecting it to magically become tea or coffee.

There's a danger that it becomes tea or coffee far more often than it probably should. Since that just continues the cycle of atrocious behaviour. Sherlock gets away with enough atrocious behaviour as it is. Though sometimes, when there's nothing spinning the wheels of Sherlock's brain at full speed he'll even buy bread. Possibly in the hope that it will become sandwiches. Maybe he thinks bread evolves into sandwiches if you leave it in on the side long enough.

John has mostly observed that bread left on the side for any length of time turns into an experiment. Even if it's just an experiment in mould (not always intentionally.)

He has a stale croissant instead of toast, and coffee strong enough to make his teeth feel like they're vibrating. Which he doesn't mind so much right this minute. Because he's wearing two jumpers and it's still _freezing._ The coffee is helping to remind him that he still has fingers.

"I thought I told him to fix the heating," he complains to no one in particular.

He takes his coffee and his stale croissant and turns the TV on. He half expects the country to have collapsed into chaos, animals escaped from zoos, martial law declared. Not so much panic on the streets, since all the streets are currently under two or three feet of snow, but an overreaction for certain. Some sort of doomsaying. But instead there's just endless stories of how bad the snow is, read by serious newsreaders who look thrilled to be at work, telling everyone in serious, droning voices exactly how much it had snowed in the night. All the grit's apparently been used already. Though they don't specify for what. John's going to take a wild stab that it wasn't so much 'used' as 'not there in the first place.'

John can hear kids outside. Flying in the face of common sense and trying to bury themselves alive by the sound of it.

Sherlock calls someone an idiot from somewhere downstairs. John's not entirely sure who. There's an outside chance that it's him.

He's curious enough to go to the window and look out though.

Sherlock is apparently paying the children to take turns carrying each other across the road in a variety of ways so he can examine the footprints.

There's a lot of giggling and falling over involved. Though Sherlock doesn't appear to be protesting too hard at the less than strict experimental conditions. At least he's wearing his scarf and his gloves today.

After lunch Sherlock brings a considerable amount of the snow inside, dropping half of it on the carpet, before he dumps it in the bath for some sort of experiment. An experiment that John really hopes doesn't involve keeping body parts fresh. If this is a Wednesday that ends with a dead body in the bath he thinks he'll probably have to put his foot down.

Either way he's clearly not going to be having a bath any time soon.

He wonders how many pairs of socks you can wear before you're incapable of walking.

  
*****

When Sherlock appears in front of the television later it's to collect a series of books that seem to have absolutely nothing in common. He mutters something about the cold interfering with his fine motor skills.

"Fix the heating," John remembers to say before Sherlock wanders back outside again.

An hour later he's trying to find his boots when his phone goes. He drags it off the table and looks at it.

 _Tea required for continued maximum efficiency.  
SH_

John scowls at the message and then types one back.

 _Manners required for tea making_

He doesn't even bother putting the phone down. He hits view as soon as the message comes in.

 _Thank you.  
SH_

John rolls his eyes and goes to put the kettle on.

  
*****

The weather eventually defeats even the great Sherlock Holmes. He reappears looking wet and frozen, cheeks bright red and that's about as colourful as John's ever seen him.

His hair's full of snow.

"It's snowing again then?" John says.

Sherlock doesn't dignify his clever deduction with an answer.

John makes him a coffee anyway, then watches him drink it while his hair drips melting snow onto the cushions. Coat and scarf still wrapped around him.

"Are you eating?" John asks.

Sherlock frowns and pulls his legs up onto the sofa.

"I think, yes."

John drags himself upright and goes to search through the cupboards for something that isn't science equipment or books. Both of which, no matter what Sherlock seems to think, are not edible.

The microwave doesn't have anything revolting in it, and doesn’t smell like it's had anything revolting in it recently, so John throws some rice in it and then stares at it revolving through the door. It takes considerably less than seven minutes for the cold of the kitchen floor to creep up through his socks and start to hurt his feet.

Sherlock's changed the channel when he comes back.

John had originally thought Sherlock would like nature programs. All those intellectually superior animals tearing the throats out of smaller, less capable animals. Instead he seems to find them horribly dull, possibly because animals don't have any motives beyond the desire to eat, and rarely try to hide the fact that they've killed something. He'd watched the one about snakes though, or as he'd subtitled them 'nature's oldest murder weapons.' With rather more relish than was probably appropriate.

Sherlock's lost his coat and now has both hands wrapped around his empty mug. John replaces the shoddy heat source with the second plate he's holding and Sherlock stares at the fork like he's trying to decide how best to murder someone with it.

John does manage to get the remote back though and Sherlock retrieves his laptop from the table rather than be forced to watch _Deadliest Catch_. How the man could have perfected the art of eating without looking but not the art of actually making himself food is bewildering.

John ignores the muttering for as long as possible. Long enough to have changed channels three times. But he thinks he actually recognises the 'I'm disappointed in _everybody_ ' muttering from the other sorts of muttering by now.

God help him.

"What?" He eventually offers sideways. He can just see the screen from here, where Sherlock has it balanced on his stomach.

"People seem to be under the mistaken impression that labelling their problems as 'complicated' inevitably makes them so. When that's clearly untrue. There's nothing even remotely taxing here. Take this one, blackmail letter sent to Mrs Westcott. It's more frustrated than enthusiastic, honestly some people don't even try. The lack of excessive pronouns and layout says male. The tone's aggressive but personal, and the wording of the insults towards to the new wife compared to the sister or the mother suggest family. Close family judging by how tightly the Westcotts control their affairs. The over-exaggerated sense of his own importance, coupled with an underlying inferiority complex tells me it's one of the younger brothers -" Sherlock hits a key and the mess of his email is replaced by a picture of group of people "- and since only one of them has a history of making bad decisions and is currently struggling to make the payments on his new Porsche, it's Robert Westcott."

Sherlock tips his head over the arm of the couch and then slides the laptop over until John has the option of either taking it or letting it fall on the floor. He stares at the two email attachments and frowns, then shakes his head.

"It's only a mystery if you're not actually looking," Sherlock provides.

"You got all of that from one threatening letter and a picture?" John still sounds incredulous, even though he's watched Sherlock do exactly the same thing a hundred times.

He still always feels like he's trying to see the trick, trying to look behind the curtain for the magician's assistant.

"Are you going to tell them?"

Sherlock makes a face like he finds the whole affair impossibly tedious.

"I realise how very dull other people's lives are but they'd probably like to know," John points out. He's fairly sure he'd like to know.

Sherlock sighs from where he's sprawled elegantly on the sofa and then throws his arms out to the side.

"And for God's sake don't send your conclusions to everybody in the Westcott's address book."

Sherlock rolls his head towards him. "I can be sensitive."

"No, you can't," John says immediately.

Sherlock raises an eyebrow at him.

"You once accused a man of being a murderer at his daughter's wedding," John offers, and really, that's just one of many, many examples he could throw out. That's not even the most shameless thing Sherlock has done, just since he's known him. Not even close.

"He _was_ a murderer."

"Not really the point I was trying to make. Breaking things to people gently - not really one of your skills."

"Fine," Sherlock says simply. "You can tell them."

John should have seen that coming really.

*****

  
When Sherlock starts what looks like it's going to be a project on the living room floor, John goes to bed.

He lays in the dark and lets the hyperactive rustle of paper from downstairs lull him to sleep.

It doesn't feel like any time at all before a crack of light slants across his face and he's dragged back to something resembling wakefulness.

Sherlock's sitting on his bed.

John scowls at him, because he's fairly sure this is one of those rare and unexpected moments when he actually knows what's going on. He almost wishes he didn't. Because it's - he checks the clock - two in the morning and that's much too early, or possibly late, for this.

He knows being lured into conversation is never a good idea with Sherlock. Sherlock is far too good at explaining things and making them sound perfectly sensible when they're absolutely not. The right answer here would be to just point at the door and not say a damn thing.

"It was to make sure you didn't freeze to death, it wasn't a _permanent invitation,_ " John says instead.

"My bed still has a dead owl on it," Sherlock explains. As if that will magically make this ok.

"That's not my problem, Sherlock, beds are for sleeping, not for experiments involving dead birds."

"I thought you'd object to it being on the sofa, or in the kitchen," Sherlock mutters and it's obvious he's irritated now. "You objected to the pig."

"Because you were dissecting it on the kitchen table. And don't even try to pretend that the dead owl is in some way my fault." John drags a hand over his face, struggles round until he can sit up, then balances his elbows on his knees. "You can't just come into my room at two in the morning and expect me to let you sleep in my bed." Anyone else in the world would know that without having to be told. Anyone in the world would understand that. Or would at least understand the mind-boggling inappropriateness of it.

John shoves a hand through his hair and forces himself not to look at Sherlock for long enough to swear under his breath. Because he'd been doing a brilliant job of forgetting how he'd woken up this morning, with Sherlock sprawled over him like he had nowhere better to be. He's not quite sure how to phrase the 'I quite liked that, which was more than a little disturbing and I'd quite like to pretend it was just a figment of my imagination' without Sherlock getting all...incisive about it. He certainly can't- won't - flat-out _refuses_ to go through that twice in one week.

"You let me sleep here yesterday," Sherlock says.

"Yesterday you had the blood flow of a snowman. It was the quickest and most sensible way to make sure you didn't die."

Sherlock's stare manages to be thorough in a way that never bodes well for anyone.

"I'll inevitably be forced to return to the sofa, the temperature of which is significantly lower than your bed, even without the added benefit of your body heat. The situation is comparable enough to yesterday."

John thinks about telling him that he's doing an absolutely horrendous job of trying to talk his way into someone's bed. But he suspects that will come out more encouraging at this point. There's nothing like giving Sherlock a challenge to make him especially impossible.

"Also, my brain seemed to find the conditions last night particularly restful. The temperature or possibly the proximity of another person. I'm not exactly sure, which is why I want to repeat the experiment."

"No."

"John -"

"No."

"It's impossible to draw conclusions from one experiment," Sherlock says and manages to make it sound like John's disappointing the entire scientific community.

He holds on tightly to that flare of irritation. "It's not an experiment, it's my bed and you're not invited."

Sherlock rolls his eyes, like John's being unnecessarily stubborn. "This was much less complicated last night."

John's far more awake than he'd like to be right now.

"This is ridiculous. You're not a small child that's had a nightmare, nor are we in any way involved. You don't have a single good reason to be in here demanding to share."

"It's still cold," Sherlock says simply. "It's still a sensible solution to reduce the amount of work we have to do while sleeping to maintain a comfortable temperature. I'm not the only one who benefits. The cold leaves you considerably more tense, and aggravates both your shoulder and your leg. It's a minimal amount of emotional irritation for a considerable payoff."

"It's cold because you didn't fix the heating," John says through his teeth. "And you're impossible."

He has no idea what possesses him to kick the other side of the covers off. None, whatsoever. He hopes its because it's two in the morning and he's tired and he wants to sleep.

Sherlock is all limbs and weight and he takes up far too much space for one person. Enough space that it's physically impossible to get away from him. Though Sherlock seems to be under the impression that getting away from the person you're sharing a bed with is not the point.

The fact that it usually isn't somehow just makes it worse.

Also, Sherlock's feet are freezing.

John doesn't know what on earth he's doing.

"Tomorrow, when the snow's gone, you'll move the dead owl, and we won't speak of this again."

"That's unnecessarily dramatic," Sherlock says.

"You realise you live in the very largest glass house there. And for future reference when you sleep with someone it's courtesy not to take up the entire bed." John will not kick him, he will not.

"I'm larger than you so it's only natural I'm going to occupy a larger percentage of the space available," Sherlock points out. Like he isn't already proving it with the irritatingly long stretch of his legs.

"That will be true only so long as I don't kick you out of _my_ bed the moment you fall asleep."

"This really is a minefield of nuances isn't it?" Sherlock sounds curious and intrigued when John had been hoping for chastised at the very least. He's insane, it's the only explanation for how Sherlock has managed to somehow end up his bed for the second night in a row. The fact that he's not even protesting any more. He's insane, he should probably talk to someone about that. Or at least look up the definition of Stockholm Syndrome, just to be safe.

It's quiet for a long minute, and then the room is lit by the muted but familiar glow of a phone.

John reaches over, without bothering to turn around, and snatches the phone out of Sherlock's hand, shoves it under the pillow. Completely ignored the irritated little huff Sherlock gives once he's denied anything to do.

"No texting adventures after two in the morning. It's one of my rules." John says stiffly.

"Why do you get to make rules and I don't?"

"My bedroom, my rules."

"Are you going to tell me the rules?"

"No," John says into the pillow.

"How do you expect me to abide by the rules if you don't tell me what they are?" Sherlock asks, he sounds almost amused in the darkness, which is unfair.

John sighs. "Fine, there's now only one rule, go to sleep."

"I find it difficult to sleep on command."

"Then pretend to sleep until you work out how."

Sherlock's laughing, he can feel the vibration. It's very hard not to smack him in the face with a pillow.

  
*****

John spends a long time being confused in the dark. Because he's fairly sure he didn't fall asleep - that he would have _remembered_ falling asleep curled in behind somebody else. He has his face pressed against skin, there's a stray tickle of hair in his nose and he has his arm slung round someone who's radiating heat all the way through him. It's a slice of warmth which is unexpected but still nice.

Until he remembers why it isn't.

Sherlock is asleep, not pretending, not listening to the pace of his heartbeat, or contemplating their relative temperatures he's actually _genuinely_ sleeping. John can feel the way his back shifts minutely on every breath.

John can see exactly what he's supposed to do, what he's going to do. Because he knows he'll unwind his arm as carefully as he can, pull his leg out from between Sherlock's and turn over. Shift into the cold space on the other side of the bed.

He waits for himself to do exactly that.

He waits so long he falls asleep again.

  
*****

  
He wakes up again at five o'clock to Sherlock muttering under his breath and typing faster than anyone has a right to be able to with one hand.

The other is holding out a -

"Tea," Sherlock says, like he's performed a magic trick.

John makes some sort of gurgling incoherent noise in his throat because a) he's not even close to awake, and b) he's not sure Sherlock has ever made him any sort of hot beverage, ever. Also, he doesn't remember him leaving the bed to do it. He's fairly sure he would have felt that, even asleep. Though clearly he _has_ left the bed, because along with the tea there's a laptop, and Sherlock appears to be wearing his dressing gown.

John struggles halfway upright and takes the mug. He's drunk half of it before he remembers that he's supposed to be annoyed about being awake at five in the morning.

He's probably still supposed to be annoyed about the bed sharing.

The tea really is very hot and very good though, so he settles for an irritated noise in the back of his throat.

Sherlock is far too awake, propped up against the headboard miles above him, with his laptop balanced on his knees and three phones scattered around him.

John's not sure where he got the third one from. The second one is his.

"I haven't been doing anything untoward with it, I promise," Sherlock says.

"If you one day developed actual psychic powers no one would notice, you realise that," John complains over the steam from his mug.

Sherlock stops typing long enough to dump a phone in his lap.

"The next time you get a text, send one back, five letters, W. R. O. N. G."

John groans and turns the phone round until he can see it.

"Sherlock, I'm not even awake, who have you been talking to at five in the morning? And how can you be so sure they're not going to dazzle you with unexpected brilliance?"

"Dr. Forbes doesn't have the imagination for unexpected brilliance."

"Fabulous, I'm going to insult someone I don't even know."

The phone beeps, sharply.

John turns it round, hits the 'view' button and blinks at it.

"It says 'Wednesday the 7th'"

Sherlock snorts in a way that has been, yet again, disappointed but not surprised by humanity.

"You want me to -"

Sherlock waves his fingers at him in a 'yes, yes, you know what to do, do it,' sort of way. Which really should annoy him far more than it does.

He sends Sherlock's scathing message, with no real idea who anyone is or what's going on. But he suspects he'll find out eventually, at some point. Probably when it's no longer important. Or when it's far too late to do anything about it.

"You realise you don't really give people a chance, you know that. Some people might get there if you took into account that some of us need to join the dots rather than just having the shape jump out at them."

"He lost the moment he stopped thinking logically and started floundering wildly in desperation for an answer," Sherlock says. John suspects he should ask him whether that's one of _his_ rules.

"Sometimes floundering wildly in desperation for an answer is the only response to you."

Sherlock huffs like he's not sure if he should be insulted or not.

John blinks at the phone, as if Dr. Forbes will somehow know the text was sent by him.

"I don't know how I feel about helping you crush a man's self-esteem, Sherlock."

"Not crushing, John, that's rather too suggestive of - Oh, oh that's positively _devious._ " Sherlock leaves the bed in an explosion of movement, laptop folded under his arm, phones shoved into his dressing gown pockets. He sweeps out of the room, following some sort of complex thought that absolutely must be dealt with right this second.

John manages to become part of the scenery long enough that he decides to slither his way back under the covers. Because Sherlock's brain almost certainly doesn't need him.

"Fix the heating," he complains, more than loud enough for Sherlock to hear.

Then he tries to find a warm spot to lay in because it's _his_ bed, and that's the sort of thing he should be allowed to do.

  



End file.
